I hope the book is aberrant and oscillatory in its editorial strategies, tracing intersections and overlaps of the inter-text, a writing that is situated within structures; a writing which refuses to be freaked out by instability.

Eleanor kept the popular blog The View From Elsewhere during her time in Alice and has drawn on her experiences there in writing this account. She also wrote for Sarsaparilla, a space some of you might remember.

Hogan’s uncompromising narrative is based on her experience living in Alice Springs between 2005 and 2010 to work as a policy officer in Aboriginal services. Looming large is a disparate population. Some residents are non-Indigenous expats from capital cities who have relocated to ‘make a difference’ as part of the town’s welfare economy. Others are the Aboriginal recipients of this welfare, many of whom Hogan shows to be living in serious disadvantage born from dispossession, and made even more difficult by seemingly unending cycles of alcohol, violence, poverty, bureaucracy and exploitation.

These depictions are not based on idle impressions, but are supported by a public servant’s eye for statistics and policy documents and a journalist’s skill in interviewing prominent community members. Lives led in this place of extremes are difficult, but are cross-cut with the pleasures of community that exist in regional centres, and the importance of sport, art, friendship, family and culture.

A tough portrait of life in a beautiful but harsh landscape of contradictions, Alice Springs is as much a series of general questions about living ethically as it is Hogan’s memoir of being an outsider looking in.

July 05, 2012

Simply beautiful post, "Memory in an Earthen Shell", by Fiona at Strange Fruit about Edward de Waal's recent session with Caroline Baum at the Sydney Writers' Festival.

It became about Jewishness. It became about everybody else’s family history and connection with the Jewish diaspora. It became about history. It became about everybody else’s sense of faith, and at least the audience groaned in solidarity when the ubiquitous (catholic) stepped up to the microphone wanting a discussion on faith, presumably to shore up or affirm her own.

But it should have been about things: the feel of them, the tactility, the making, the holding, the drawing out of formlessness to form. About fingers, palms. About the scent of wet earth, about sculpting and pinching and creating a thing. About the way the sensation of that object prompts feeling and thought. About the way history and memory will come to reside within.

De Waal answered this question beautifully, saying his faith manifested in a jewish-zen-quaker-protestant way….which is perfectly evident if you actually look at his work. His work is peaceful, silent, contemplative. It exists, within the context of the florid, almost baroque family history of which he writes as a pause, a caesura, an almost-absence. An immaterial materiality, so to speak, a pause in the concerto, a breath between arias. The collections, the vast castles, the pattern, colour and gold of the culture, experience and possessions of which he speaks and his family owned and lost is transcended by the purity and quiet of his own practice.

July 02, 2012

I'm still occasionally surprised to see that my 2006 boutique list of Australian literature blogs gets visits, and links out. So I've updated it and added the terrific blog of Australian writer Jane Gleeson-White, bookish girl.

In the last two weeks Jane has been that most valuable of bloggers, a chronicler of events.

She brought us words and pictures from the launch of Jennifer Mills' short story collection in Glebe.

In the meantime, all you other book bloggers out there, be mindful that there are searches for Australian literature blogs going on, so whack that text into your blog somewhere. Better still, make a longer list than mine and use it for a heading. Go, you good things.

September 21, 2010

It has come to my notice that I have new subscribers - no doubt this is due to my decision to maintain the Randolph Stow tribute post at the top of Reeling and Writhing's front page (though they could also have moved from Bloglines, which is closing, to Google Reader).

Be advised, all ye, to avoid further confusion of new visitors, that of today STUMPS is the top post.

But while I do have your attention - it's cheering to know that the Productivity Commission's inquiry into a national disability insurance scheme attracted a whopping number of submissions. Those which have been put online can be read here (mine is no. 420). For more about the NDIS, see the disability politics tab above. If you do hear from me here again, it will be a notification that I have a disability politics blog elsewhere...

June 04, 2010

The time has come, a fact's a fact. Though Peter Kenneally has gently accused me of being all Farnsey about it*, I am pulling up stumps here, and decamping quietly to my internet scrapbook at Mulberry Road. (It's okay, you can all come...if you like. But it will be quieter.)

*I have misremembered that - it was somewhere else, regarding something else. Sorry for taking your name in vain, sir. I do feel like Farnham though.

I did try to manage my internet habits so that I was no longer a purveyor of links. But...I think I actually got worse before I got better.

Let's face it - the news is all around you now, from SPUNC, City of Tongues, Kill Your Darlings, LiteraryMinded, Kerryn's new offering Read, Think, Write, Meanjin, Overland, the Wheeler Centre, Unwakeable, the Oz, even the Paris Review - so all good Ozlit news junkies know where to go.

As I say goodbye (though this site will stay here so links will be maintained), I want to note that the death of Randolph Stow in the age of digital publishing is as good a time as any to say goodbye. The last post will remain at the top of the page here as a memorial, because I can, because I'm a fan

I hope you won't mind keeping an eye out for news about the National Disability Insurance Scheme during the Federal election (and the State, if like me you are unlucky enough to have two this year). I've created a page with some links and information for interested parties - click on the tab above for details if you'd like to know more.

Thanks to all who have visited, commented, sent me books, and invited me to events or made me welcome at their gatherings, and above all, been friends through some testing times. It's been a great ride, and I've enjoyed your company. Take care.

May 31, 2010

So many books, only one life...I thought at first Mr Deaver was a serial killer, which is why I clicked on this when it came up in my reader. Got him confused with someone else....It is, after all, a fine name for a crime thriller writer .

From last week, there are five book reviews up on the blog at Overland. What a great platform for blog reviews - good to see this.

Included is a review of Lisa Dempster's Neon Pilgrim, Alec Patric's poetry collection which has been released as an e-book, and Emmett Stinson's short fiction collection, Known Unknowns, from Affirm Press.

'that rarest of things in the internet age: a cinematic Trojan horse.'

His full review will be posted on his own blog, Celluloid Tongue, in good time, in good time.

One of my favourite short story writers is putting one up a month as a podcast, and selling the print version from her website as a zine (and Jen makes pretty ones.) We are lucky punters. Get over there and listen, and send off for a bundle when she has a few more up. I will be.

Polari's first issue features an interview with Edmund White, poetry
by Pam Brown, the short fiction of Dallas Angguish and the writing of Staceyann Chin. This new international journal is is currently holding an open call for submissions from LGBT and queer
writers for its second issue, with a publication date of October 1st 2010.

And finally this link from John Williams at The Second Pass, to an interview with US historian Jill Lepore, carries a very sweet tale of an inspiring letter with it. What an interesting idea for a teacher to have, taking letters every year from 15 year old pupils and posting them back five years later. I wonder if he ever got any of them mixed up...(yes, that would be me if I was that teacher.)

Cautiously, I explain that I believe an artist's work is inconceivable
without a strict ethical sense.
A long silence.
"What you say is true. But moral values are inaccessible. And they
cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass
judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the
notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You
cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful.
Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a
way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way,
perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found."

And secondly, draws our attention to the online publication of a translation of an early story by Thomas Bernhard.

April 28, 2010

The handbag really came to the fore as a fashion item in the 1920s, when flappers ventured out into the social world without their mothers or male companions. Little bags became essential. Originally an upper class necessity, the handbag quickly became a symbol of women’s independence. Griselda Pollock reminds us that ‘going out in public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied’ (Vision and Difference , 1988 p. 69). The handbag announced self-sufficiency and mobility and offered some sort of protection from potential disgrace—it symbolically allowed the new woman to be wherever she wanted, unencumbered by chaperones.

Some of you will have noticed the current fashion for enormous
handbags—it seems that the skinnier and more toned the celebrity the
bigger and floppier and more elaborate her designer tote will be.
Perhaps as she is more and more exposed in the media her bag gets bigger
and bigger to show that she retains some secrets.

And there is
something taboo about the inside of someone’s bag—you shouldn’t go
rummaging about in there if it’s not yours—Farid Chenoune, a curator of
handbags at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, says that the
similarity between an haute couture tote and a satchel belonging to an
African witch is that both bags hold a secret of some sort: ‘what you
put in your bag is very important to you. That makes a bag very
personal, because in it you have a secret. A secret gives you some sort
of power’.

April 13, 2010

As I usually say of my friends' endeavours, BLESS THIS SHIP. A balanced, well-rounded barque it is, full of fine present and future sailors, and if I had more nautical knowledge I'd develop that image. Let's just say it deserves a really good crack across the bows with some top Oz bubbly, and some crimping in Lygon Street afterwards.

April 07, 2010

Anglo-Hungarian poet George Szirtes often posts huge chunks of his latest translation on his blog, a free universal lunch if there ever was one. For a break, he writes sizzling stuff like this, because he can.

Dury was never quite punk. Punk felt to me like an intellectual gesture,
a feeling that was a thought. It immediately spawned writing and
theory. In that sense - in the sense that it was theoretical - it wasn't
fully English, not, at any rate, as I think of English. Dury, though an
educated man - Royal College of Art, and clear references to reading -
was more belly-wit and in many ways more troubling than punk. Punk
aggression was a fully articulated conscious gesture. Dury's demon
worked its way through the body into word, heavy blurty body-words that
needed an agile body music like jazz funk.

I liked the struggle,
the way the demon got smart without losing its energy. The struggle was
with the chains of the body. The struggle gave him energy, and the
energy gave him wit. Struggle, energy and wit made for exhilaration. The
best songs - and there are probably not that many of the best ones - I
find enormously exhilarating. How much of that is down to Chas Jankel
and the Blockheads? A great deal.